Dyn

ICANNWiki Silver Sponsor
Type:	Privately Held
Industry:	Internet Performance Solutions
Founded:	USA, 1998
Headquarters:	Manchester, New Hampshire
Country:	USA
Employees:	250-300
Website:	Dyn.com
Blog:	Blog
Facebook:	Dyn
LinkedIn:	Dyn
Twitter:	@Dyn
Key People
Jeremy Hitchcock, CEO Cory von Wallenstein, Chief Technologist Kyle York, CRO Graham Chynoweth, COO Timothy O’Toole, CFO Matt Larson, Chief Architect Scott Hilton, EVP, Product

Dyn (pronounced “dine”) is an Internet performance solutions company that provides traffic management, email management|message management and performance assurance to over 4 million commercial and private users worldwide with major customers including Twitter, Netflix, Pandora, Zappos, CNBC, Etsy, Box, and StumbleUpon. These solutions are supported by services including paid domain registrations, recursive DNS, email forwarding and redirection, network monitoring and URL redirection. Dyn’s corporate headquarters are located in Manchester, NH, USA, with offices in Brighton, UK, and San Francisco, CA, USA.

In June, 2009, it became the first managed DNS provider to offer its Dynect Platform clients DNSSEC.

History

Dyn began in 1998 as a free service running out of a college apartment at Worcester Polytechnic Institut. It was called DynDNS and offered users a DNS service capable of hosting a website from a home computer. As the business continued to grow, it shifted from a free model to a donation-based model, which enabled them to make $40,000 in weeks, from users around the world. From there they became a recurring revenue SaaS company, until they realized, in 2005, that many prominent corporations were using their exclusive suite of software. Thus, they further catered their services to the corporate market, reassessed their financial requirements, and began to offer more unique options for DNS solutions.

They began outsourcing to the market in 2007. In 2010, the company purchased three companies -– SendLabs, EveryDNS, and EditDNS.

In September, 2012, Dyn announced that it had acquired the SEO/SEM services of one of its early clients, Incutio. They had been outsourcing their SEO and SEM needs to Incutio for over a year prior to the team talent acquisition.

Services

The company offers core engineering services specializing in Apache, Python, FreeBSD, OpenVPN and Perl.

$38 million Minority Investment

In October, 2012, it was announced that Dyn had received a $38 million Series A minority investment from North Bridge. The investment deal also expanded the Board of Directors for the company, adding 3 more positions, two from North Bridge; the board was originally staffed by only Dyn's two founders. In an open letter to his employees and others, CEO Jeremy Hitchcock stressed that his company had been courted by other investors for some time, and that his decision to go ahead was North Bridge was the opportunity to keep doing what was best for the company, but with more resources, including greater contacts in related portfolio companies and a well-staffed board, to do so.

ReadyStatus Acquisition

On December 23, 2013, Dyn announced it had acquired ReadyStatus, a tool that notifies customers of planned and unplanned service interruptions, thereby creating improved communication between end users and companies. The company has many plans for this new service, one of which includes integrating ReadyStatus with Dyn Managed DNS advanced feature Traffic Director, so if a company’s site goes down, their homepage can automatically failover to a status update page and end users won’t be left in the dark. Dyn customers should expect general availability and complete integration into the future product suite in the next year.

Trendslide Acquisition

On May 13, 2013, Dyn announced it had acquired Trendslide, a mobile dashboard app startup. The acquisition expands Dyn’s services to now include mobile data and analytics offerings for online businesses. While this mobile app was traditionally intended to be a sales/marketing tool, Dyn will now position it as a DevOps tool for its customers. This move, combined with the acquisition of Verelo in late 2012 and the hiring of Pete Cheslock as Dyn Director of Dev Tools and the promotion of Carl Levine to DevOps Evangelist, is proof that Dyn is committed to being an important voice and part of the DevOps community.

Verelo Acquisition

On January 2 2013, Dyn announced that it had acquired Verelo, a Toronto-based website monitoring start-up. Just a few weeks prior, Verelo announced to the public that it would be closing down six months after its launch as it did not have the resources to gain traction and take the company to the next level. Dyn subsequently approached the company and made an undisclosed offer that provided for a return to Verelo's initial investors. The company offers website uptime and performance analytics as well as malware detection and site health monitoring services, and given that Dyn's mantra is "Uptime is the Bottom Line", the acquisition will be used to offer a number of new services to its customers at no extra charge.

Associations

Dynamic Network Services, Inc. maintain associations with the following organizations -

• NANOG
• Community College System of NH
• ICANN
• MAAWG
• ABI (Amoskeag Business Incubator)
• NHHTC
• Stay Work Play
• MYPN
• IETF
• US First

Awards and Recognition

• Named as one of Achievers 50 Most Engaged Workplaces in the United States on January 14, 2014.
• In November 2013, Dyn was listed as #210 on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 List.
• Listed as #1135 on the famed Inc. 5000 list in 2013, Dyn's third consecutive year in making it on the list.
• Recognized by WorldBlu as one of the Most Democratic Places Workplaces of 2013.
• Business New Hampshire Magazine recognized Dynamic Network Services as The Best Small Company to Work for in NH in December, 2010; it won the same distinction in 2007. It will also enter in the ‘Hall of Fame’ in the year 2011. It was also the 2nd Best Small Company to work for in NH in the year 2009.
• In 2007, Dynamic Network Services got listed on Inc. 5000 list.
• In 4 years, from 2003 to 2007, the company’s growth rate was 208.7%; it was subsequently ranked 73rd in the list of "Top Companies in Telecommunications" in US by Trade Publication Inc. Overall, it ranked 11th in New Hampshire.
• Dynamic Network Services, Inc. received the Innovation Rocks! award from the New Hampshire Division of Economic Development’s Business Resource Center.

WikiLeaks

Dyn, Inc. was quickly wrapped up within the controversy of WikiLeaks' release of classified American documents as they provided web-hosting services for the site. Dyn stopped hosting Wikileaks on Dec. 2nd, 2010; Wikileaks had made its big release a month prior. Dyn has said it was forced to stop hosting the site after numerous DDoS attacks, which put its ability to provide for its other 500,000 customers in jeopardy.